English

Camus: The Plague

The Absurd, the concept, as used by Camus, is the apprehension of all experience as having nothing to do with you, your understanding or well-being. Not yours, nor anyone else’s. His brand of existentialism is about what to do in the face of this? Albert Camus’ 1947 novel is having a moment... We’ve touched on the science, ethics, and politics of the current pandemic. In addition to being vulnerable organisms and impersonal collectivities, we are humans, sometimes, too. Existentialism is a philosophical orientation that takes this as a starting point. It is intimately concerned with actual human experience, not its reduction to the merely empirically accessible or to some ideal it might conceivably live up to but never does. It starts with the messiness of subjectivity. Lived experience has a quale (a qualitative aspect) to it that is both shareably universal and personally unique. “Existentialists” probably agree on little else but that. Camus denied being an “existentialist,” and Kierkegaard was one long before Sartre coined the term but would likely also have rejected the label. To reject the finality of labels is, in fact, an existentialist trait. Existentialists don’t do dogma

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